Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2005-27

Plugins can be used to load privileged content

Announced

February 24, 2005

Reporter

Michael Krax

Risk

Moderate

Impact

Critical

Products

Firefox, Mozilla Suite

Fixed in

Firefox 1.0.1

Mozilla Suite 1.7.6

Description

Plugins (such as flash) can be used to load privileged content into a frame.
Once loaded various spoofs can be applied to get the user to interact
with the privileged content. Michael Krax's "Fireflashing" example
demonstrates that an attacker can open about:config in a frame, hide it
with an opacity setting, and if the attacker can get the victim to click
at a particular spot (design some kind of simple game) you could toggle
boolean preferences, some of which would make further attacks easier.

The "firescrolling" example demonstrates arbitrary code execution
(in this case downloading a file) by convincing the user to scroll twice.